MA Reception Courses

Dr Matthew Hiscock [Pre-approved module from the MA in Reception of the Classical World at UCL]

This module will be taught by a combination of lectures, seminars and research visits to relevant institutions, such as the British Museum, Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, British Film Institute and Sir John Soane Museum. The core module is intended to provide training in research techniques and resources for postgraduate study in the reception of antiquity, and to introduce students to relevant methods and theories of classical reception studies, as well as offering an overview of different kinds of reception in practice. Assessment will be two coursework essays of 4,000 words each. For students on the MA in Reception of the Classical World there will also be an oral disseratation presentation.

Day: Thursdays 2-4pm

UCL room: G09 Gordon House

This course is also available to UCL students on other MA programmes as a 30 credit unit. Assessment: 2 essays of 3,000 words.

Ancient Rome on Film

Professor Maria Wyke (UCL)[Pre-approved module from the MA in Reception of the Classical World at UCL]

How does cinema reconstruct Roman history? What distinguishes cinematic histories of Rome from conventional scholarship? The option will introduce students to the relevant critical vocabulary of reception studies and film analysis, and engage with issues of sources, narrative, spectacle, contemporaneity, commodification, and spectatorship. Through study of a variety of Italian and American representations of ancient Rome, students will explore changes and developments in Rome’s cinematic historiography from its beginnings to the Second World War. The module will then explore a variety of post-war Hollywood ‘blockbusters’ and the decline of the genre in the 1960s. It will conclude with examination of variations from and challenges to the classical Hollywood style of representing Rome, and with consideration of the disappearance of such reconstructions in the 1960s and their re-emergence in the 21st century. Assessment will be by 3 essays of 4,000 words.

Day: Thursdays 11-1UCL room: G09 Gordon House

This course is also available to UCL students on other MA programmes as a 30 credit unit. Assesment: 2 essays of 4,000 words.